“All Creeds and All Classes”?: Just Who Made Up the Gaelic League?

Abstract

“ALL CREEDS AND ALL CLASSES”? JUST WHO MADE UP THE GAELIC LEAGUE? TIMOTHY G. MCMAHON scholars studying the role of the Gaelic revival in recasting modern Irish identity have generally focused their research on three main areas: specific controversies between Irish-Irelanders and Anglo-Irish littérateurs; descriptions of ideological polemics (such as Douglas Hyde’s “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” and D.P. Moran’s The Philosophy of IrishIreland ); or the careers of a relatively few revivalists who gained prominence in public affairs.1 In the main these treatments have failed to investigate who joined the major organizations associated with the revival, including the membership of the Gaelic League, choosing instead to extrapolate rather broadly from a few incidents or individuals about the part that the revival played in redefining the everyday lives of Irish men and women. On the other hand, Tom Garvin and John Hutchinson have offered important and somewhat broader interpretations of the Gaelic revival. The former has claimed that the Dublin-based league was initially dominated by a coterie of “middle-class scholars and dilettantes,” only to be overtaken by a lower-middle-class cabal whose narrow political aims distinguished them from the more broad-minded founders of the movement.2 Hutchinson, JUST WHO MADE UP THE GAELIC LEAGUE? 118 1 Three works are particularly detailed in their treatments of the Gaelic revival: Ruth Dudley Edwards’s biography of Patrick Pearse, Tierney’s biography of Eoin MacNeill, and the Dunleavys’ biography of Douglas Hyde. See Michael Tierney, Eoin MacNeill: Scholar and Man of Action, 1867–1945, ed. F.X. Martin (Oxford, 1980); Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London and Boston, 1979 ed.); Gareth W. Dunleavy and Janet Egelson Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland (Berkeley, Calif., 1991). Three general works also have important comments on the revival. See F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford, 1979); Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: Two Centuries of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980 (London and Boston, 1983); and D.G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (3rd ed., London, 1995). 2 Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858–1928 (Oxford, 1987), 79–80. meanwhile, has argued that the league in its mass phase became “a movement of the relatively educated young against both the established and relatively uneducated strata—farmers, publicans, and shopkeepers.”3 Men and women of the younger generation, according to Hutchinson, turned to Gaelicism (and ultimately to Sinn Féin) because they were frustrated by limited career opportunities and faced the choice of being incorporated into a modern “scientific state” or remaining loyal to their traditional culture. Such conclusions situate the revival in the mainstream of European romantic or reactionary nationalist movements, particularly those of central and eastern Europe, where researchers have long identified members of the middle and lower-middle classes as key ideologues, organizers, and participants. Essential to these portrayals is a sense that men and women joined nationalist movements precisely because they were caught “in the middle”: Although relatively well off in terms of their educations or their earnings, they recognized that their potential for significant social and political advancement was limited by the circumstances of their respective multinational states. Ultimately, when a movement developed under such conditions, widespread recognition of “blocked mobility” created the potential for revolutionary—and paradoxically conservative—events like the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21.4 But three objections can be raised to this line of argument. First, Hutchinson and Garvin base their conclusions on virtually no empirical study of league membership and therefore on the untested assumption that the social composition of the league changed after an unspecified period of time, so that frustrated lower-middle-class members preponderated. SecJUST WHO MADE UP THE GAELIC LEAGUE? 119 3 John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism; The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London and Boston, 1987), 179. For a brief synopsis of his views and his critique of Garvin, see John Hutchinson, “Irish Nationalism,” in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London and New York, 1996). 4 The literature on...